Here we can discuss anything about this Lemmy instance/server itself.
Our XMPP support chat: Movim or XMPP client.
Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
Cempasรบchil, also called marigolds, is the flower traditionally used to honor the dead during Dia de los Muertos. Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a multi-day Mexican Holiday. It is celebrated the first two days of November, with November 1st dedicated to the remembrance of dead children.
We briefly broke our habit of not commenting on electoral political developments in !meta in December 2024 when we reported that the United States had elected a fascist government. Our characterization of Trump's regime and the MAGA movement as a US-localized version of the regimes of Mussolini, Franco, and Hilter has only been proven more and more prescient, as masked government agents attacking and kidnapping protestors, citizens, and immigrants in defiance of the rule of law. Trump's regime builds expensive concentration facilities and gaudy palatial vanity projects while pushing working Americans deeper into poverty.
We've joined instances from DBZer0.com to Lemmy.world in adding maga.place to our blocklist, defederating SLRPNK.net from the servers entirely. This prevents them from attracting new users by federating our posts and comments, and prevents their users from harassing SLRPNK members. The maga.place instance joined the Fediverse one month ago, and appeared on our radar when the admin began appearing in SLRPNK posts and communities.
We're not the first to block Hilariouschaos.com either, which also hosts fascist content and tolerates right-wing trolls. We've been side-eyeing this server for a while, but the eager collaboration between HC users and maga.place has made the fascist trends on HC unambiguous enough to take action.
This is consistent with our defederation standards. We've always encouraged good faith discussion between a spectrum of ideological and political positions, and stood up for our members to moderate their communities according to their politics, even when it contradicts our own. We have also ejected members who consistently engage in trolling, bad faith argument, and spreading demonstrably false information. When an instance has cultivated a significant culture of trolls and bad faith actors, we have defederated from those instances. We've blocked Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml on that basis.
Our blocklist is not limited to instances that tolerate modern forms of fascism, but all fascist instances belong on our blocklist. Fascism is a fundamentally irrational political position, and is impossible to defend rhetorically with good-faith argument. Reality is the source of ideological truth. Among people who hold these positions, this relationship is flipped, and ideological truth is the source of reality. This is why they so easily dismiss evidence out of hand that contradicts their narrative, and the admin of maga.place's reliance on claims of 'fake news' regardless of the source and credibility illustrates this point.
Several servers we federate with do not block maga.place. This means maga.place won't see your posts or comments on these servers, and you won't see content posted from maga.place to these servers either since we began the block. It also means members of these servers will see content from both us and maga.place, and may encourage more fascists to join these instances to get around the block. Posts on these servers will appear alongside posts from blocked servers, despite there being no other interaction besides proximity.
We encourage other admins to add maga.place to their blocklist as well to prevent cultivating a fascist audience. Trolling is a form of censorship, a performance of irrationality intended to frustrate people engaging in good faith and drive them away from platforms that tolerate this behavior. The casual dismissal of scientific consensus without evidence and other irrational antics takes a much darker turn once the political power of trolls is great enough to make their critics disappear. Incarceration, deportation, and murder for political thought are all much more significant forms of censorship in comparison to federation blocks.
While most instances institute these blocks without comment, others engage in a form of internal comment or debate. Sh.itjust.works engaged in a public discussion, and is currenly voting on the issue (only SJW members should participate in the vote thread). A similar discussion occurred on Lemmy.ca, and they ultimately decided to defederate.
The politics of voting on the Fediverse probably deserves its own discussion; at SLRPNK, we wear our ethos on our sleeve, and we feel acting within the bounds of our server's ideals should not require a bureaucratic process. We are committed to transparency and open discussion, hence we walk a middle ground between seeking a formal public mandate and silent executive action.
Due to the nature of our server, most of what I've said is probably taken for granted by most of our members. Solidarity and coalition building are powerful tools in resistance to fascism. I've dedicated a large portion of this meta post to this discussion in solidarity with all of the members of other platforms who are also calling for their admins to defederate from instances that encourage fascist trolls. I'm tagging the admins of several instances who still federate to welcome them to join the conversation here and on Sh.itjust.works as well.
Since we are getting into the dark months of the year again here is a quick update on how our solar-power production is going: In October it has been rather rainy at our server location (due to several Atlantic storms passing by), therefore only 67% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels. The average over the last three months was 83%, with the downward trend starting in September (88%). The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy and the good news is that this nearby geothermal power-plant is currently being renovated and expanded (and will include a modern thermal spa soon as well, yay).
We did a quick server OS update earlier today, which went smoothly, so there isn't much to report on. Overall we have still some pending hardware changes to reduce energy consumption a bit, and those will require some unscheduled server restarts. We also discussed the updated plans for the potential Piefed migration in the server upgrade thread here, tl;dr: the main blockers should be gone now, but we need to set up a Piefed test instance and investigate the database structure for creating a migration script. As a preparation, we already have a working object storage setup on our servers now, which should make media storage easier to expand in the future. The first test case for it is a new PeerTube instance that our hosting organization f-hub.org recently added.
Now itโs your turn to share whatever youโd like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community youโd like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If youโre a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
โฌ Union Resources ๐ฅ
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
There is some heavy load hitting our main front-end on slrpnk.net right now. I guess some AI scraper that found a way around Anubis or so. For the time being I temporarily shut off that frontend to not overload the server's CPU, but I have no immediate idea how to fix the issue.
Native apps and alternative frontends like the one on https://photon.slrpnk.net/ are for now not affected.
Edit: turned it back on and the load didn't return immediatly. Lets see how it goes ๐
I really like being on this instance! Thanks for everything admins ๐
Just today started reading a bit more about xmpp and I noticed in the wiki that there is some kind of work in progress integration.
Not urgent but I would be interested to know how the integration is done and what remains to be done.
Edit: ok, upon further reading, I am guessing the xmpp integration is via the movim instance and somehow our accounts or at least login credentials are synched.
The XMPP imtegration has been set up and working for a many years now (could you link to the wiki page that says it is still a WIP?)
The XMPP can access the Lemmy database to verify credentials, which allows your existing login details to function as an XMPP account as well.
I am guessing the xmpp integration is via the movim instance and somehow our accounts or at least login credentials are synched.
Yes, it's also mentioned at the bottom of this meta post we're on. You don't have to use Movim, your slrpnk XMPP account can be accessed from any XMPP client.
You can login by inputting justjack23@slrpnk.net + your existing slrpnk password, and your chosen client will login to our hosted XMPP instance. :)
Just tried, seems very cool.
Also about the wiki: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/slrpnknet/page/xmpp-chat-integration
Idk if f-hub is maintained I got the link from: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/ ->
"hosted projects wiki on F-hub.org." ->
Yeah, that is semi-maintained. I moved most of the stuff over to wiki.slrpnk.net but decided to keep some of the more technical things there back then. The "work in progress" was actually supposed to refer to this documentation page, not the integration itself, but I see now how that can be easily misunderstood. Edit: I made some small changes to the wiki page.
Ah, I didn't think to check f-hub, I was only looking around on the slrpnk wiki itself without success ๐ Thanks for the link!
If I had to guess, the 'This is a work in progress.' on F-hub is referring to the wiki-page itself, not the XMPP integration (which AFAIK is complete).
Defederation from MAGA.place and HillariousChaos.com
And nothing of value was lost.
Thanks as always for the hard work and transparency.
Respect to @sunshine@lemmy.ca and @kersploosh@sh.itjust.works for taking initiative and leading discussions and votes on defederation.
We've compiled an informal and incomplete list of servers we federate with who also federate with maga.place. Federation by default is considered best practice, so none of these admins have intentionally endorsed a fascist instance. I hope this post and the linked threads are informative in making your own decisions.
Oh hey thanks for the ping. To be honest I've just never heard of maga.place - and looking at it, it seems quite small so that's probably why.
In any case I will defederate it. There's really nothing good that can come of such an instance.
Thank you for your quick action. I've updated the comment.
Thanks as always for running the best instance! I appreciate all the effort y'all put into us having a good home in the Fediverse.
Hey ma! My little dirt sniffing community made the news!
The various flavors to be imbibed directly into the nostrils for analysis:
This is amazing. we're called dirt sniffers in industry, as we often smell for hydrocarbons to determine if soil is contaminated - or in my case, if the naturally occurring hydrocarbons were present, and should be avoided during soil salvage operations
You guys are doing a great job, thanks for what you do.
I think you wanted !lunar_punk@slrpnk.net, the underscore was missing.
Ah, that was my bad, thanks for catching it, Nemo! :)
Thanks for the shout out regardless Prodigal Frog & Five and for catching that Nemo! The odd spelling may be my bad, I believe I tried the other way, but either way it would be great to see the community take off a bit more and CouncelingTechie and I are pretty open to whatever community members want to bring to it.
Thanks, fixed!
I think it would be a good idea to create a convention for naming communities. Lunar_punk is a bad name. LunarPunk is a good community name.
Sorry, but these small nitpicks do make all the difference in attracting users.
I think that would be a good idea too. Would you like to play a role in developing SLRPNK's style guidelines?
I left a comment but it didn't go through for some reason. Here it is again:
Sorry for the late reply. I don't know what a style guideline would entail, exactly. The only thing I can think of is in the naming of communities. And that can be explained in one sentence.
Communities should be named in an easy to write way, and easy to read. For example, lunar_punk should be LunarPunk. Say there is a community called word1word2. That should be Word1Word2. It is easy to read, thanks to the capitalisation of the words. It is also easy to write, since there are no underscores, just normal characters and one doesn't even need to capitalise the words for it to be a valid URL.
I think the most important part for naming Lemmy communities is interoperability with Mastodon. Lemmy adds the community name as a hashtag to each post, so posts here for example get the #meta hashtag when viewed from Mastodon, and thus people subscribing to that hashtag see it in their feed.
I don't use mastodon. I think my naming suggestion still works best for tagging on mastodon though. It is still more visually appealing.
But ya, I still see naming on Lemmy as one of the big hurdles towards getting a bigger userbase. There is just some annoying friction that pisses me and I am sure it pisses newcomers even more. Instances with names such as lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Another thing I hate is that the UIs don't show the true name of the community but their alias. For example, we have a community called climate here on slrpnk. However, UIs (both mobile and desktop), show the name "climate - truthful information bla bla"... I find that to be horrible UI. It should show that the post is coming from "climate@slrpnk.net". I hate hate hate that.
I totally agree on the last point. Mixing the display name with the domain makes no sense and is really confusing.
That is worth mentioning in the wiki.
I just have been enjoying solarpunk content as best as I can and haven't much to add. It is getting darker as the months go by.
Thank you for the hard work, itโs nice to see you take action. I recently started using Lemmy and havenโt been able to see more about politics around the world, so any recommendations? Thanks!
Beehaw's world news is a great source of general world politics. There are also regional instances with their own political communities that can give you a local perspective on world events, like
Appreciating the push for ghostarchive.org โ reuters has now blocked both archive.today and web.archive.org, leaving ghostarchive.org as the only archive site which can be used share their articles. (You can still clear cookies for each article you want to read)
Thank you for your efforts to make reading news more accessible to the Fediverse, including frequently sharing gift articles from paywalled publications.
I could not login to the wiki using my lemmy acct. Response is: thpdo: Statement did not return 'name' attribute [auth.php:493]
You need to set both an display name and an email in your Lemmy profile for it to work.
It is a limitation of the current auth integration that it requires this, but I have an idea for a workaround. It requires to write a rather complex SQL statement though and I have not found the motivation to do that.
A note about ability to use "world@lemmy.world" - today it didn't load at all. I let the tab wait for something like 10 minutes. It stayed like that.
Then I refreshed / reloaded the tab. And behold - it loaded.
I subsequently found a thread I wanted to comment about. Upon posting there, to my surprise, I received the error message "Lemmy is currently starting". Upon a repeat attempt, posting also worked.
I don't know enough about Lemmy internals to make sense of it, but wanted to write down the experience.
We are having some odd server issues since a few days and high database load for some reason. So it probably ran into some temporary error or so. But not sure.
I understand not everyone here loves voting but I feel strongly that at minimum community discussion regarding big decisions like defederation would be beneficial. I would not characterize that as bureaucratic.
An outline of the reasoning and supporting evidence would be good to see, and allowing users to engage and interrogate that evidence.
I generally feel like defederation is overused on the fediverse and one of the things I like about this instance is that we havenโt had incidents of defederation over petty squabbles like Iโve seen on other instances. Iโm not saying thatโs the case here although Iโve personally not seen any fascist content on hilarious chaos so that one is a bit confusing to me.
I understand where you are coming from, but I also feel like this would put an undue burden of proof on what is often a decision based on a build up of smaller issues, private communication between admins and various off-site user/admin behavior in fediverse related chat channels that would require serious effort to document and also compromise confidentiality in many cases.
In addition, examples for such discussions on other instances usually meander aimlessly for quite some time (all the while the negative influence of the instances to be defederated continues), and if you force a vote on it, the results are usually quite unsatisfying, similar to our vote about enabling down-votes a while ago, which ended like 55% for enabling it, but with a low participation and somewhat dubious democratic legitimacy overall.
But I wouldn't be opposed to having an community discussion on why an instance should be re-federated, and have considered starting one for the case of Hexbear, since their admins regularly accuse me of having made the defederation decision pre-maturely and only based on a hunch, but requiring a community vote in advance on what I consider mostly a curation and moderation decision seems counterproductive. And I can assure you that we discussed this internally and I am always the first to argue that we shouldn't be too trigger happy when it comes to defederation (and I think our rather short defederation list shows this).
I was more advocating for a place to discuss the decision and share relevant information than a direct vote. If any of that information canโt be easily documented or shared then a brief summary or whatever can be shared would suffice.
Obviously we are limited by the way Lemmy is set up and the constraints of self-hosting but I really donโt like the top-down decision-making model that most Lemmy instances operate by. But since Iโm not starting my own I guess Iโll just have to keep complaining haha. Maybe the best solution is to just spend less time online since we donโt really have the freedom here we once did anyway.
Well, what would be your suggestion how to do it differently?
Just discussing it on a /c/meta thread doesn't seem particularly useful and a vote is unlikely to yield meaningful results as few people seem to follow these threads.
It is also a questions of who this impacts the most and therefore should have the most say. As others have already alluded to in this thread, defederation is to a large part a tool to lessen the moderation workload. Furthermore, for a regular user it isn't particularly hard to move instance if they don't like moderation or defederation decisions, but moving communities is much more complicated.
Thus we can and probably should ask about defederation decisions in our moderators xmpp channel, but in this case it didn't seem particularly controversial or high impact, so we didn't do that.
This is not a "First They Came" moment.
Save these arguments for when it's worth arguing. The admins are abundantly clear in their rationale, evidence, and clearly indicate that this is not a trend for this instance.
I like thinking of the fediverse as a do-ocracy rather than a democracy: people who do the hard work get the say. Volunteer moderators that have to sweep the sewers of comments are the ones to decide what to defederate. If I am unhappy with some decisions, I may start my own instance, which is actually relieving some work from the other volunteers and making the overall ecosystem more resilient.
Opinionated moderation decisions are a feature I feel.